How to use Toggl

Toggle lets you record the time spent on various work or personal tasks. You can even produce reports so that you can bill customers or organise your time better. We show you how to get started.

Record how long you spend on tasks and find out where time is spent

By
Roland Waddilove
| 30 Jul 2013

Track time spent on tasks using Toggl

Do you sometimes wonder where all your time has gone? Do you complete every task? Do some jobs take longer than expected? Toggl can tell you all this information.

The Toggl website, desktop program and smartphone app can record all the tasks and jobs you do. Whether you spend 10 minutes checking email or 10 hours writing a report, Toggl can record it.

Tasks can be started and stopped, and you can continue later, so each time you check your email, you can record it. Begin a job in the morning and you can stop for lunch and carry on afterwards. Tasks can be assigned to projects and tags are used to label them. Daily, weekly and monthly reports show exactly where your time was spent. We look at the free plan here, but with a paid plan you can bill people for the time spent on jobs too.

How To monitor tasks with Toggle

Step 1. Go to www.toggl.com and it immediately starts timing you. Ignore this and click the Sign up button on the home page. Use the option to sign up for free and enter your email address and think of a suitable password. There’s no need to pay.

Step 2. The browser looks like this when you first sign up and it is mostly blank. The main part of the screen asks “What are you working on?” and below is a large area for “Stuff you have done so far.” Click in the box and enter your current task.

Step 3. When you add a task and click the Start button, Toggl starts a timer and clicking the Stop button stops it. Tasks are added to the ‘Stuff done so far’ list and Continue links enable you to carry on with tasks previously worked on.

Step 4. A couple of days later you can see how Toggl lists the tasks worked on, showing today, yesterday and so on. Click Tags under the task at the top and click Create new tag. Create tags for work, personal or whatever you need.

Step 5. Tags are a bit like labels in Google Mail and you can see them in the task list below. They are useful for organising work. There is a Billable button so you can assign tasks to customers or clients, but only in the paid Toggl plan.

Step 6. In addition to tags, you can also create projects with one or more team members. Click Settings at the top and then select the Projects tab. Click New Project. Most of the features in this section are for paid plans, though.

Step 7. Click Reports at the top to go to this screen where you can see exactly where you have spent all your time. Select the date range at the top right, select the tags to view on the left and the chart shows your activities.

Step 8. Click Home at the top to return to the home screen. Click in a task and it opens up to allow it to be edited. A task can be assigned to a project that you created earlier. There is a Continue link and a trash can to delete it.

Step 9. The website must be used to access advanced features like reports, but for creating and recording tasks there’s a desktop app that can be downloaded and installed on all your computers. It automatically syncs everything with the website.

Step 10. You can create a new task or click an existing task to continue it. The timer starts and the time spent on it is added to the total time for that task. Click Tags to add tags and there is a Billable button for Pro users to track costs.

Step 11. A great feature of Toggl is that it runs everywhere and even if you are on the move and have only your smartphone, you can still record tasks. Here is Toggl running on a Samsung Galaxy S4. You can create tasks, start and stop them and so on.